Anyone who thinks student activism is a thing of the past isn’t familiar with the collegiate “green” movement. The lead of Jim Smith’s “round-up” feature about how green power and sustainability are changing the culture of the University of Connecticut focused on the university’s EcoGarden Club, a group of students, primarily ecology and evolutionary biology majors, whose organic garden is sustainability exemplified. Using “time-honored agricultural practices – such as composting, crop rotation and companion planting – that help to conserve water while producing hearty crops without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers,” they grow healthy vegetables that make it to UConn dining halls and enhance the diets of the resident population, without middlemen, shipping costs or a carbon trail.

Researching the story, Jim didn’t have to dig deep for material. The soil is rich. From formal (and often highly innovative) components of curricula in several different disciplines to the wildly visionary EcoHusky program, a student group launched in 2004 that has become the lightning rod for UConn’s green movement, the catalogue of programs was too big to be corralled in a single 1,000-word feature. So Jim settled on a representative array of successful programs that positively mirrored UConn’s top-to-bottom commitment to sustainability, and he wrote an article allowing articulate, passionate students to tell the story of how a great public land grant university is reenergizing itself in some very important respects.

Click on the link at left to read "The Blue and White Goes Green" on the UConn magazine website.